Scaling Linux to New Heights: the SGI Altix 3000 System

SGI ProPack also includes several tools and libraries to help improve performance on large NUMA systems for solving a complex problem with an application that needs large numbers of CPUs and memory, or when multiple applications are running simultaneously within the same large system. On Linux, SGI provides the commands cpuset and dplace, which give predictable and improved CPU and memory placement control for HPC applications. These tools help unrelated jobs carve out and use the resources they each need without getting into each other's way or help prevent a smaller job from inadvertently thrashing across a larger pool of resources than it can effectively use. Therefore system resources are used efficiently and deliver results in a consistent time period—two characteristics critical to HPC environments.

Also, the SGI Message Passing Toolkit (MPT) in SGI ProPack provides industry-standard message passing libraries optimized for SGI computers. MPT contains MPI and SHMEM APIs, which transparently utilize and exploit the low-level capabilities within the SGI hardware, such as its block transfer engine (BTE) for fast memory-to-memory transfers and the hardware memory controller's fetch operation (fetchop) support. Fetchop support enables direct communication and synchronization between multiple MPI processes while eliminating the overhead associated with system calls to the operating system.

The SGI ProPack NUMA tools, HPC libraries and additional software support layered on top of a standard Linux distribution provide a powerful HPC software environment for big compute and data-intensive workloads. Much like a custom ASIC on hardware providing the “glue logic” to leverage and use commodity processors, memory and I/O parts, SGI ProPack software provides the “glue logic” to leverage the Linux operating system as a commodity building block for large HPC environments.

No one believed Linux could scale so well, so soon. By combining Linux with SGI NUMAflex system architecture and Itanium 2 processors, SGI has built the world's most powerful Linux system. Bringing the SGI Altix 3000 system to market involved a tremendous amount of work, and we consider it to be only the beginning. The aggressive standards-based strategy that SGI has for using Linux on Itanium 2-based systems is raising the bar on what Linux can do while providing customers an exciting, no-compromises alternative for large HPC servers and supercomputers. SGI engineers—and the entire company for that matter—are fully committed to building on Linux capabilities and pushing the envelope even further to bring more exciting breakthroughs and opportunities for the Linux and HPC communities.